Collecting Ethics
To collect fossils, there are various legal realities that must be observed. Permission should be sought before collection begins on private land. Hammering the rocks in national parks and other areas of natural beauty is often discouraged and in most cases is illegal.
The first expressly-worded fossil-collecting code was published from the museum-home of pioneering geologist Hugh Miller at Cromarty, on the Highland east coast of Scotland, 11 April 2008. It was introduced by Michael Russell, Minister for Environment, Scotland, as part of celebrations honouring the bicentennial of the founding of the Geological Society of London. The code supplements an existing draft drawn up by English Nature.
The code advises fossil collectors to seek permission from landowners, to collect responsibly, record details, seek advice on finding an unusual fossil and label the specimens and care for them. Its principles establish a framework of advice on best practices in the collection, identification, conservation and storage of fossil specimens.
The non-binding code of ethics for this field was drawn up by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) following many months of consultation with fossil collectors, landowners, palaeontological researchers, and staff of Scotland's museums.
Read more about this topic: Fossil Collecting
Famous quotes containing the words collecting and/or ethics:
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)